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speech and thought were essential to the exercise of reason; to the Romantics,

freedom was essential for the exploration of the emotions and the imagination.
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Therefore, to be described as a liberal in the 19 century could mean different things,
but a general inclination towards freedom was shared by them all.

The inspiration for Cavour’s liberalism was Great Britain, as it was to many European
liberals. He was an admirer of Peel - moderately liberal, cautiously reformist,
presiding over a developing economy, founded on a policy of free trade, conservative
but progressive. When Cavour became Prime Minister of Piedmont (technically called

the Kingdom of Sardinia ruled by the royal House of Savoy) in 1852, these were the
policies he promoted. But another issue came to dominate Cavour’s premiership:
Italian Unification. Nationalist feeling was on the rise. It had erupted into widespread,
but unsuccessful, revolutions in 1848. Cavour was worried about the threat that
Italian nationalism could present to Piedmont. Mazzini’s aim was a democratic
republic of Italy; Cavour was implacably hostile to this. On the other hand, Piedmont
was the strongest state in Northern Italy. Could it take the initiative by exploiting the

rise of nationalism and using it to challenge Austrian rule in the northern provinces of
Lombardy and Venetia?

The inspiration for Lincoln’s liberalism was the American Revolution and the
Founding Fathers. Born in 1809, he was brought up in poverty in the meritocratic
world of commercial farming, mostly in Indiana, and worked his way up to become a
successful corporate lawyer (often representing railway companies) and rising
politician in Springfield, Illinois. He inevitably became embroiled in the slow-burning

issue that increasingly defined the shape of American politics from the 1850’s:
slavery. He was elected to the Illinois state legislature, then the House of
Representatives for Illinois. He became a leading member of the Whig Party and the
new Republican Party which replaced it and was elected President in 1860. The
Republican Party was Northern and anti-slavery, and Lincoln’s election as president
was the event which triggered the secession of the slave-owing South from the

Union, fearing that the Republicans were bent on abolishing slavery. In fact, the
Republicans were divided on the issue. Lincoln himself had never been an
abolitionist. Even now, as civil war loomed, his priority was not the moral issue of
slavery, but the nationalist issue of preserving of the Union.

Thus, for both Italy and America, national unity had become a key issue by the end of
the 1850’s. Cavour would go on to essentially create modern Italy, while Lincoln, by
defeating the South in the Civil War, reunited the United States and laid the
foundations for modern America.